1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to high performance printers and more particularly to monitoring print jobs being printed in such a printer.
2. Background Description
State of the art printers, such as laser printers, are complex multi-featured units that typically provide users with robust printing for professional results. Typically, these state of the art printers include an embedded control system for monitoring and controlling numerous print jobs at various stages of being printed by the printer. Frequently, a user or operator may wish to know where a particular previously submitted print job is in the printer, e.g., spooled, partially processed for duplex printing, printing or printed. Similarly, one may wish to determine which and how many jobs are ahead of a particular job, e.g., a job that currently is being converted to a raster pattern. However, the complexity of these state of the art printers makes it difficult to track the progress of a single job or, even to identify what jobs are currently being subjected to a particular operation or, at a specific stage within the printer.
However, often it is desirable to retrieve general status information for any print job or for any printer component. This information can be useful in debugging, e.g., for determining why a particular job has failed to print and where the failed job has stalled or hung. Unfortunately, since many printer components operate somewhat independently, identifying where and how a particular job or jobs have failed is not a straightforward task, but may be very difficult and complicated. Current technology and state of the art printers do not provide for determining exactly which job is currently in which job location at any given time.
Thus there is a need for a way to dynamically locate and track print jobs being processed in a printer.